!
Reread and destroy that which I place in your hand.

THOMAS JEFFERSON.

Jacqueline laid down the large, blue, crackling sheet, and took from the
floor beside her, where it had fallen, the President's enclosure. Hand
and eye moved mechanically; she neither thought nor feared. Her judgment
was in suspension, and she was unconscious of herself or of her act. The
seals upon this second letter were broken. She unfolded it. On the
outside it was addressed in a hand that, had she thought, she would have
recognised for Tom Mocket's, to an undistinguished person at Marietta
upon the Ohio; within, the writing was her husband's and the address was
to Aaron Burr. The date was last August, the subject-matter the
disruption of the Republic and the conquest of Mexico, and the detail
of plans included the arrangement by which Rand was to leave Albemarle,
ostensibly to examine a purchase of land beyond the mountains He would
leave, however, not to return. Once out of the country, he with his wife
would press on rapidly to the Ohio, to Blennerhassett's island.

The summer night deepened, hot and languorous, with a sweep of moths to
the candle flames, with vagrant odours of flowering vines and vagrant
sounds of distant laughter, voices, footsteps down the long street.
Jacqueline sat very still, the letter in her lap. The curtains at the
window moved in the fitful air. Through the open doors from the kitchen
in the yard behind the house came the strumming of a banjo, then Joab's
deep bass:--

"Go down, go down, Moses,
Tell Pharaoh let us go!
Go down, go down, Moses,
King Pharaoh, let us go!"

There was a wave of honeysuckle, too faint and deadly sweet. A party of
men, boatmen or waggoners, went by, and as they passed, broke into rough
laughter.

Jacqueline rose, letting fall the letter. With her hand to her forehead
she stood for a minute, then moved haltingly to the window. Her eyes
were blank; she wanted air, she knew, and for the moment she knew little
else. She was whelmed in deep waters, and all horizons were one. When
she reached the casement, she could only cling to the sill, raise her
eyes to the stars, and find nothing there to help her understand. There
was in them neither calm nor sublimity; they swung and danced like
insensate fireflies. The honeysuckle was too strong--and she must tell
Joab she did not wish to hear his banjo to-night. The men who had passed
were still laughing.

S